Wahmanholm: Absolutely unerring choices. Always surprising and inevitable. Lucid nightmares. And much the same could be said for the other volumes I read last spring.
I’ve been reassessing my “Finished” program, and I think it’s time to make a few changes.
First, I’ve long been aware that I tend to re-read books in the fall more than I read new books, so I am anticipating a decrease in my willingness to tackle new work. I’ll still be reading some new/unfinished things, but not at the expense of re-reads.
Also, I feel as though I have achieved the root reason for doing this: my poetry TBR shelf is now just over a third of what it was at the end of 2018.
And instead of weekly updates, I’ll be going back to a monthly update, like I did in April. So this will be the last update until the end of September.
Nothing. I didn’t pick up a book of poetry except to move it out of the way as I reached for something else.
Another week in which I didn’t actually complete anything. I’ve been drifting through some poetry collections that are re-reads for me, but the bulk of my reading has been non-fiction and several novels.
Nothing. Between Anniversaries, which I just started last week, and pushing almost everything else aside to finally finish Through the Eye of a Needle, I have devoted very little time to reading poetry.
- Melissa Stein: Terrible Blooms (Copper Canyon, 2018)
- Ada Limón: Bright Dead Things (Milkweed Editions, 2015)
Limón: Before buying her book from the publisher’s booth at Wordplay last week, she was only a name to me.
There is a popular trend in the current era to strive for a very informal, conversational style. When done poorly, it’s insipid, self-indulgent, and therapeutic, like reading someone’s diary. I found her best poems to be all the more powerful precisely because of how deftly she employed a quotidian voice that at times almost verged on clumsy, only to tighten up into a musical clarity all the more surprising.
I did find the collection to be a bit uneven, but that’s not remarkable; I find most poetry collections uneven.
Despite a short trip to Florida and other distractions, I somehow managed to finish three short books this week.
- Whitman: Leaves of Grass (1855 Edition) (Penguin Classics, 1986)
- Ron Padgett: Big Cabin (Coffee House, 2019)
- Todd Boss: Closer than Home (self-published chapbook, 1993)
- Christopher Logue: War Music (FSG, 2015)
This book is sort of a cheat: it’s a new edition of a book I’ve already read, gathering some new material I hadn’t seen before. I only read those sections, and browsed the rest; it definitely merits a cover-to-cover re-read.
This is the first week that I haven’t finished reading any book of poetry, and there are several reasons for this.
First was an influx of new books (and not just poetry) that I bought last week during Sixth Chamber’s last week of business, which swamped my TBR pile.
Second was two long nonfiction books I’m reading, both engrossing; one of which I’m sprinting through the last 100 pages. I’ve therefore been juggling the two to the exclusion of poetry.
Third was that I’m trying to finish several poems of my own which are still in draft, and I’ve been finding it hard to read poetry while also trying to write it. (This isn’t always true for me, but it has been recently, for whatever reason.)
Last was the death on Friday of WS Merwin, which meant any other reading was put on hold as I pulled my Merwin off the shelf to revisit his work.
The third week in a row with only one completed book.
- Paisley Rekdal: Imaginary Vessels (Copper Canyon, 2016)
- Basho (Corman, trns): Backroads to Far Towns (White Pine, 2004)
Cid Corman perfectly captures the diaristic tone of Basho’s haibun. Informal dispatches from a roadtrip. I’ve read many translations of this work, but this was the first one that made me wish Wim Wenders would make a movie version of it.
- Galway Kinnell: Three Books (Mariner, 2002)
- Tomas Tranströmer (Fulton, trns): The Great Enigma: New Collected Poems (New Directions, 2006)
- Nicola Stӑnescu (Cotter, trns): Wheel with a Single Spoke (Archipelago, 2012)
Stӑnescu: He bears a strong resemblance to early Residencia-era Neruda — that wild, defiant surrealism that’s almost violently playful. (Pairs well with Andrei Codrescu who, of course, sees Stӑnescu as a profoundly important influence.)
- Harryette Mullen: Recyclopedia (Graywolf, 2006)
- Linda Gregg: In the Middle Distance (Graywolf, 2006)
Gregg: Mostly harmless. A few bright and surprising poems in an otherwise pedestrian collection. Minimalism is one thing, but not quite going far enough is another. Some poets benefit from seeing many of their poems together, others are better one isolated poem at a time. Linda Gregg, for me, seems to be among the latter.